No one in the world travels more ostentatiously than the president of the United States. First, there’s that huge 747, carrying many fewer passengers than such behemoths are capable of carrying, and carrying them in gadget-glutted luxury. Then comes the motorcade, all flashing lights and hulking black SUVs, speeding the POTUS (Secret Service lingo for President of the United States) on his appointed rounds.
The chief executive is attended by hordes of armed defenders and fawned over by thousands of admirers, all of whom had to use petrochemical technology to get to the fawning site. The event attracts the inevitable protesters, who also contribute their own exhaust gases.
Then the two dozen or so vehicles comprising the motorcade, plus the motorcycle escort swarming about, blocking intersections, causing hundreds of cars to waste gas idling, roars like a buffalo stampede back to Air Force One. And before long the very large plane lumbers into the sky, guzzling huge quantities of jet fuel as it accelerates and climbs.
It must create a carbon footprint the size of an open-pit coal mine.
So it seems a bit cheeky for the president to criticize billionaire executives for transporting themselves in private jets as they dart around the country making bad investments. But that’s part of the politics of the stimulus package, and it makes a certain amount of sense. If corporate executives get money from the federal government, whether bailout or stimulus, they shouldn’t be spending the taxpayers’ money as profligately as they’ve become accustomed to spending their corporate money. It just doesn’t look good.
Now, if the president continues to move about as custom and security dictate — and the trappings of office always seem to increase from year to year, never decrease — well, most taxpayers have come to accept that.
So it was probably a good idea for the president to leave Washington to sign the stimulus bill, as he did last Tuesday in Denver. The rest of the country seems much mellower than the poisonously partisan Congress.
Out beyond the Potomac, it’s possible to find even some Republican elected officials cheering the stimulus package. Something must be done, they reason. And even if it’s not perfect — and it’s not — it’s at least something.
In Washington, Democrats continue to find the opportunity to spend irresistible. And Republicans continue to insist, with only three dissenting votes, that the bill had way too much spending and not enough tax-cutting. Tax cuts, they say, are the way to stimulate growth. The government doesn’t create jobs.
Oh, but it can. And, while Tuesday’s bill-signing backdrop of sunshine and blasting winds provided tangible evidence of why Colorado is a good place to foster a renewable energy economy, there’s another good example here of how government can create jobs.
It’s called Denver International Airport. Yes, it cost more than it was supposed to, and it was late in opening. But the bonds are being paid off. And it was perhaps the major thing that lifted Denver out of its recession in of the 1990s. And those weren’t government bureaucrats pouring concrete, they were private contractors. Nor was it only spendthrift Democrats pushing the project. It had enthusiastic support from the business community, and a lot of those folks are Republicans.
In a way, it’s too bad Air Force One didn’t use DIA instead of Buckley Air Force Base. It would have showcased another example of how a government stimulus can improve the economy. But then, DIA is so busy and successful, all that ostentation would have created too much of a disruption for the tens of thousands of travelers who use the airport every day.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News. His column appears twice a month.
